


Electricity

by solongsun



Series: Maps [2]
Category: Dir en grey, the GazettE
Genre: M/M, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 10:15:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14258790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solongsun/pseuds/solongsun
Summary: Aoi.





	Electricity

**Author's Note:**

> You **will** have to had read Maps for this to make sense/have any kind of context.

Aoi awakes to a spotlight. No, a distant sun. No, a moon.

He screws up his eyes, trying to lift his head, but something grabs at his shoulders and holds him down.

The room is full of the smell of disinfectant and, just beneath it, the oily-sweet fug of ether. It's a scent that seems to linger on his pillow; he wrinkles his nose, tries to turn his face away. He focusses his eyes on the bright moon that hangs in the darkness before him, trying to figure out what time of day it is: he mentally places himself in the morning, the afternoon, in the middle of the night, experimenting to see what feels right. The afternoon, perhaps. The moon is silvery and vacant, growing no nearer or further, blurring slightly when he squints his eyes; it offers him no answers.

Alone in the room, Aoi sighs. He feels a terrible thirst, but that will have to wait.

In his head he practises saying to himself, _my name is Aoi Shiroyama and I'm twenty-four years old_.

It all feels correct. Restlessly, he tries to stir under the covers, but he's pinned tightly down. He feels the sheet binding him across his shoulders and inwardly itches against it, gritting his teeth. His jaw aches from how often he's been clenching it recently; he can still taste the rubber plug some nurse or other forced between his jaws earlier.

_Some trap you've got yourself into, Aoi._

A bright blue scream leaping through his head.

 _Idiot_.

He breathes out slowly through his teeth. The moon in the door suddenly blacks out, a momentary eclipse caused by the head of a passing nurse; it clears again.

 _I grew up in Mie, and now I'm in...Kyoto_.

He examines it for errors.

_My mother's name is Fumiyo, and my father's name is Matsuda, and the current prime minister is..._

The knowledge is there; he knows it is, but the harder he grasps after it the further it seems to retreat from him. It's like walking down a staircase and finding, suddenly, a step missing; the drop in the stomach, the plummet into empty space.

 _Fuck_.

Because there's nothing else to do, he turns it over in his mind: what he's done, how he's got here; how he's managed to get himself so neatly caught. Uruha...trying to save Uruha again. Trying, always trying, and failing; losing.

His presence seems to linger out of sight, silent and blond, perhaps just a single moment away from stepping out of the darkness that billows on either side of the moon.

These are the memories they'd better not have touched; these are the important ones.

He closes his eyes and tries to remember how

 

_he's facing out of the window, watching the way the hills shimmer through the heat haze, giants that flatten out into nothing. The sky is blue overhead; off in the distance, almost no colour. The city is down there somewhere, hidden._

_'Shiroyama,' the nurse is saying from behind him, 'Please, why don't you say hello to your new roommate? Takashima here is joining us from Kanagawa, and—'_

_'I'll say hello,' Aoi interrupts in a pleasant tone of voice, 'When you give me back my_ fucking _clothes.'_

_He turns, smiling sweetly into the nurse's face, 'Got it?'_

_To give her credit, her expression doesn't change. 'If you want your own clothes back,' she says sensibly, 'Then you'll have to apologise for your behaviour in group therapy, won't you? Now, Shiroyama: this is Takashima. Say hello, please.'_

_'Hi,' Aoi says grudgingly, his eyes performing the merest of flicks upward towards his new roommate's face, but then he stops. He double-takes._

_The kid standing in front of him is hanging his head, and his shoulders are so tense they look jagged enough to cut; he's fiddling, fidgeting,_ twitching _constantly: here he tugs his cuffs down, over and over, the motions jerky and repetitive; here he rubs his palms against his pants like he's drying them but unceasingly, until Aoi's wincing with how raw they must feel. He's staring fixedly down at the floor, his eyes blinking and precise and picky intervals that make Aoi's own eyes itch; he makes no move to look up or say hello back but simply stiffens up a little, the line of his jaw getting sharper as he presses his lips firmly together._

_Aoi shifts himself around so he can see him better and leans back against the wall. He props a cigarette between his lips._

_'_ Thank _you, Shiroyama,' the nurse says. 'Can I leave you two to get acquainted? I want to know that I can count on you to show him where the dining room is, where the bathrooms are, the leisure room –_ yes _, Shiroyama?'_

_'Yeah, yeah,' Aoi says uncaringly, still staring at his new roommate; he all but waves the nurse away, and she withdraws. As she leaves she casts a worried look behind her and she pushes the door only halfway shut, an action that normally makes Aoi seethe but today seems less important._

_Now they're alone together, the new roommate's nervous twitching and fidgeting gets worse than ever, and Aoi fights the urge to grab his hands and hold them still. He lights his cigarette and takes a long drag._

_'What're you in for?'_

_He gets a split-second's impression of a pair of very dark eyes glancing up at him, but he almost could have imagined it. He sits forward on his bed. 'Don't you talk?'_

_Encouraging: there's a flinchlike movement that could be interpreted as a nod._

_'If you do ever open your mouth, don't bother calling me Shiroyama; I hate it. My name's Aoi.'_

_This time there's something like a murmur from behind the curtain of dyed hair that blocks his roommate's face._

_'Huh?' Aoi asks indelicately._

_'_ Uruha _, I said.'_

 _It wasn't his imagination the first time: that same pair of dark eyes come glaring up at him. 'My name is_ Uruha _,' he repeats, his voice quiet but distinct. 'Why are_ you _here?'_

_Aoi grins. 'I asked you first, blondie.'_

_There's a pause in which Aoi worries that Uruha might have gone mute again, but after a second he reaches his pale, long-fingered hands up to his face, pushing his hair back behind his ear. His eyes close for a moment and he starts tapping on the sides of his head, his lips twitching a little as he counts under his breath._

_'I have to,' he says finally, 'My dad says it's good for me.'_

_His teeth snag on his lower lip and with a stuttering movement he looks Aoi in the eye. 'He cares about me a lot,' he says softly before he turns away, leaving Aoi to stare at_

 

the pale moon for as long as he can, and then closes his eyes. When he does so it's glowing on the backs of his eyelids, hovering, blue as electricity.

They'd both been so young then; he can see that now. He can't quite figure out how accurate his recollections are: had Uruha been the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, or had he simply been so desperate to find somebody else who was like him? Had he really felt, looking at him, like he could have been in love right away?

He blinks listlessly up at the ceiling: well, no. No, he hadn't, and as much as he tried to fool himself, he had never been that type. It had always seemed to him, growing up, that he wasn't capable of love at first sight simply because he wasn't generous enough, because he wasn't receptive enough; he lacked those soft edges.

So what had he felt, then? Curiosity, maybe; attraction. Something strange akin to recognition; like deja vu, impossible to quantify. Those things and annoyance, irritation; all that and then a wave of fierce protectiveness that made him want to bare his teeth and snarl.

But no, he's getting ahead of himself. How had it happened; what was the order? For months at first they had barely spoken, he remembers that, and sometimes Uruha had cried at night but in such a muffled, choked-off sort of way that Aoi had known he wasn't supposed to say anything; wasn't supposed to be hearing.

But it had been one of those nights. That part, he remembers perfectly: that it had been September and just starting to get cooler at night, the last of the golden summer fading for another year, and Aoi had woken up to the sound of him crying...no, not crying. But breathing heavily, in a way that had made Aoi thought he was. And he remembers how he had turned his head and found a bright pair of eyes fixed upon his own in the gloom, and maybe he'd made some noise, said his name maybe, because the next second Uruha was flinging back the covers of his bed

 

_and he's on him, crawling under his blanket, long arms seeking out his body in the dark; Aoi makes some startled noise but it comes out muffled, pressed into the pillow. Uruha must have heard it, though, because he stills._

_He's lying behind him, their bodies curled together, and Aoi can feel his breath on the back of his neck; warm, quick, shallow breaths, making the skin there feel hot and damp. His heart beats a frenzied pattern against Aoi's back, tapping away like fingers, like Uruha's fingers that are always tapping on everything, pulling at everything; a pattern, and Uruha loves patterns._

_Aoi turns in his arms, strokes the hair back from his face and finds Uruha with eyes tight shut, too ashamed to look at him; his jaw is tense but he leans forward and presses a nervous, clumsy kiss to the skin of Aoi's throat._

_Just that, and it sends a shiver through him._

_'Uruha,' he says stupidly, his voice ragged sounding. His roommate's eyes open and they look at him, dark and hectic; there's confusion in them, somewhere, a sort of unformed quality to the way he looks at Aoi's body; runs a shaking hand down his chest._

_'What are you—?'_

_Aoi cuts himself off as Uruha grabs his hands, drags them towards his own skin; he places them under his T-shirt, just above the fragile flare of his young hipbones. It's quiet enough for Aoi to hear it as the breath catches in his throat._

_But he's beautiful; his pale skin almost glows in the dark. With tentative movements Aoi splays his fingers out over Uruha's belly, keeping his touches gentle, flirting lightly with the skin there. Under his hands, it's responsive. He feels it as Uruha sucks in a deep breath._

_'This?' Aoi asks in a careful whisper, watching his face, 'Is this what you want?'_

_Almost frantic, Uruha butts his head upwards, pushing it into Aoi's neck._

_'Please,' he mumbles, his hands thin and strong around Aoi's wrists, pushing them to touch him all over, 'Please. Please.'_

_'Wait,' Aoi breathes as Uruha drags his hand between his legs, 'Just – wait.'_

_It's awful, how desperately Uruha looks at him, and Aoi stares back at him helplessly. Whatever words Aoi had to say seem to fade away in his throat, and a little nervously he tilts his head forward, catching Uruha's lips in his._

_He can tell from the way Uruha freezes for a moment that he's not expecting it. His mouth is so soft, the shape of it uncertain; Aoi sucks lightly on his lower lip and feels Uruha's cock twitch between his legs, starting to harden against his palm. Dizzy, he pushes back against it and feels the groan that comes from Uruha's throat; the way his roommate clutches at him. He's saying something, Aoi can catch snatches of it dimly as Uruha's stuttering lips travel all over his neck and jaw and shoulders, but none of it makes sense; he's muttering as if he wants to distract himself, only interrupting himself occasionally to gasp, to pull Aoi closer, to let the words that Aoi can understand out: 'please,' he whispers, over and over again, 'please, touch me, please. I need you to. Please.'_

_Aoi dimly wonders if this might be a dream. It could be some sort of crazy incubus except that Uruha's hands are shaking so much, and that his lips press so sweetly, and when Aoi's hand finally slips beneath the waist of his pyjama pants and wraps around him he cries out, roughly, the sound only half-smothered in Aoi's neck. He's completely hard now, his cock jerking against Aoi's palm, and the tip feels wet and slick. The heat of his skin is incredible; Aoi wants to bury himself in it._

_It's an awkward angle as he starts to touch him, his hand caught down between their two bodies; his own stock still and Uruha's writhing indecently. They're close enough for their hair to tangle on the pillow, Uruha's soft blondness getting mixed up with his darkness; acting on impulse Aoi kisses him again, and again, his hand stroking his cock fast under the covers. He hears him moan and wants more of it; he kisses his cheek, feels how flushed it is against his lips._

_'Can I use my mouth?' he whispers. He curls his fingers gently around the waist of Uruha's pyjamas and together they tug them down, Aoi's movements smooth and Uruha's erratic._

_Under the blanket, the air is at blood heat, and Aoi kisses his way blindly down Uruha's body. His lips trace his way to his roommate's cock, heavy and hot feeling, and a little giddily he laps at it with his tongue; feels the contortion in Uruha's body and hears, from a muffled distance, his gasp._

_His hands shake a little as he gently touches Uruha's hip, guiding it back to open up the angle of his body; Uruha's fingers tangle in his hair and he pushes his head in closer, letting the smell of his roommate's skin go to his head._

_He's so hard, his cock pressing against Aoi's cheek. When he takes him into his mouth it's clumsy and inexpert but Uruha cries out anyway, canting his hips forward, opening his legs wider; there's a taste to him that makes Aoi feel almost dizzy with want. He sucks, letting his lips rub against Uruha's flesh, and he feels how fiercely the other man breathes. His legs tremble; Aoi strokes them, tries to soothe him. Lewdly, Uruha moves against him._

_From then on it's quick, Aoi doing his best to imitate all the things that get him off; he sucks until his jaw aches and his head spins, clutches Uruha close to him, feeds off his little moans and his whimpers_ —

_'Don't let any get on me,' Uruha whispers deliriously, 'Don't let any – don't let it – please don't let it—'_

_It swirls meaninglessly in Aoi's ears, all but drowned out by the noise of his own rushing blood as he forces his head down harder, Uruha's cock rubbing against the back of his throat. There's a wonder to that feeling, something compelling; the feeling of being stretched, of being filled, hitting Aoi like a sugar rush. Uruha's actions aren't violent so much as simply uncontrolled; his hands are tight on Aoi's head and his hips keep jerking forward as if trying to get more of him; his thighs are parting further and further, inviting Aoi between them; he rolls almost onto his back, pushes his hips up, cries out._

_Desperately, Aoi slips a hand between his own legs and begins palming his own cock. He feels drunk off the taste of Uruha, of the feel of him against his tongue; he moans around him and feels it more than hears it as Uruha almost sobs, spilling himself into Aoi's mouth. Breathless, Aoi pulls back to gasp, and a spurt of cum spatters over his chin and lips._

_Quiet, then._

_Just the sound of Uruha's high, fast breathing; just the feeling of his hands, curling over and over in Aoi's hair._

_Overwhelmed, Aoi lets his eyes fall shut and butts his head gently forward, resting it against Uruha's belly. Softly, he presses a kiss to his spent dick, nuzzling it with his nose._

_'Uru,' he says, using the affectionate name without even realising it, marvelling at how breathy his own voice sounds, 'I—'_

_Abruptly, he's shoved away._

_His head knocks the wall with a hollow noise and the sheets tangle around his sweaty skin; he panics, feeling the warmth and softness tear itself away from him as Uruha fights his way free of the bed; as he stumbles to the floor, his body rigid._

_'Uruha,' Aoi gasps, wiping the smeared cum from his face with the back of his hand; he doesn't know what to say. When he sits up he finds himself freezing, utterly incapable of anything in the face of Uruha's wild panic; the way he tears at his hair, rips at his own skin._

_'Get it off,' he's moaning, almost crying, his voice high and tense, 'Get it off, please,_ please _, get it off, please—'_

_'Uruha,' Aoi tries again, getting clumsily to his feet; he reaches for him but a sharp elbow hits him in the stomach, doubling him over. He falls back against the bed, his own erection softening rapidly, his body bent with shame._

Did I hurt you?

_He sees how the body in front of his shivers, clutches at itself; how it sobs, roughly, into the darkness._

Did I hurt you?

_His eyes widen as_

 

he stares at the ceiling, trying not to let the stupid tears spill over. Years later, the memory moves before him in the darkness, seductive and miserable: the way Uruha had clutched at him, and the way he had pushed him away. The awful, deepening guilt, harsh as a bruise inside his chest: needing to know if he'd hurt him; never finding out the answer.

He blinks stubbornly, turning his head to the side. Over here it's all cool, soothing blackness; no dumb moon to stare at him and accuse him. His head aches.

That had been the first time they'd dragged him up here, and Aoi shivers because it was worse then; no pain relief, no sedatives. He'd been nineteen when they'd first strapped him down to the bed, wires sprouting from his temples like some alien being, and each shock had screeched through him with bone-breaking force.

All this time later, the clearest image he can summon of it is vision of his spinal cord contorting until it snaps, clearish fluid dripping out of it as he shrivels in his binds. The noise is an electrical howl; the rattle of his own teeth banging together. Waking so muddled, having to wait so long for things to clear; fighting as hard as he can to avoid being dragged into the ECT room again, and his hard-as-he-can not being hard enough.

Slowly, Aoi closes his eyes, trying to calm himself down. He's thought about Uruha a lot over those long weeks; whatever else has been jolted out of his mind, the feeling of the other man's body against his remains clear. It's the first thing he reaches out for when he wakes up; the feeling when he finds himself alone is one very similar to grief, darkening into the familiar guilt.

 _What did I do to you_?

Every time he sees Uruha's face in his mind the other man simply smiles, offering no answers. He recalls how it was months before

 

_he's allowed back on the main ward again. His room is bare now, completely empty on what was once Uruha's side: they've moved him out, of course. Aoi now sleeps alone, on his side because ever since being on the other ward, sleeping on his back makes him feel like he's being smothered. There's a steady clicking in the back of his head, the sound of an electric fence, that keeps him awake._

_He feels sick to the core inside, bad the way fruit goes bad, a great rotten dark streak flowering through him. He feels tainted somehow, not good enough to be with the others; he puts effort into avoiding them until it occurs to him that he doesn't really need to: they're working just as hard to stay away from him._

_He feels himself become a sort of opposite, like the negative of a photograph._

_He feels himself become a shadow._

_He takes to wandering at night, slipping like a ghost through the deserted corridors, counting the squares of shiny linoleum like Uruha would: soothing patterns, soothing numbers, safety in divisibles, in multiples, in squares._

_He copies him, as if he'll ever understand him._

_Night owl._

_Obsessive._

_Tapping, whispering, counting. Twelve, the safest number, Uruha's favourite._

_One, two, three, four, five, six_

 

seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Aoi let out the breath he'd been holding, balled his hands into fists under the blankets. What happened next was another empty space, a step to jump over; the feeling was frustrating, that he couldn't _see_ it but he could see the torn borders _around_ it, the place where it was ripped away.

He closed his eyes, thought about it happening again and again. Tomorrow, or perhaps later today if it was morning, they would come in and they would give him the pills, two of them on a little tray, blimp shaped; red and blue zeppelins that would carry him up to some great height and then let him fall, let him drop back down into the world of that electric hum, that machine whir, and with a flash and a crackle of static they would burn out another section of his brain. Zap out a few more of his memories.

It was almost painless. Just the awful idea that every time he woke up he was less than he had been before, when he'd always wanted to be more – to be better.

He gritted his teeth; forced himself to concentrate.

_The memories are there; you just have to find them._

_You just have to think._

_You just have to think._

He just had to think

 

— _anybody was in here.'_

_He hovers uncertainly in the door, a pale wraith in familiar pyjamas, and Aoi lowers the hand that's holding his cigarette._

_Unconsciously, he places both arms behind his back, as if to prove that he means no harm._

_'I'm sorry,' he mutters, 'It's all yours. I'll go.'_

_'No,' Uruha says, his voice tight and abrupt, 'Stay. Don't go.'_

_Across the dim room, the two of them stare at each other miserably. The shapes of the furniture in the leisure room are like some sort of trick, paper ghosts in the gloom; Aoi watches as Uruha winds his way through them haltingly, feeling his way like a blind man. He counts his steps in the dark, stumbles, shortens his step so the number comes out at twelve. He miscalculates: he stands too close._

_'Look,' Aoi says uncomfortably, 'I promise, I never meant to hurt you, or – or upset you, or anything like that, I just...' he sighs shakily, rakes a hand through his hair, 'I just – I don't know why but I couldn't resist you, not when you were cuddling up to me like that and asking me to touch you like that. I couldn't, but I_ should _have, and I'm sorry. I don't have any excuses. I know I fucked up. I—'_

_'They made you go away,' Uruha mumbles, his voice quiet but oddly distinct, and Aoi stops, feeling helpless._

_'Yeah.'_

_Wide-eyed in the dark, Uruha blinks up at him._

_'I don't want you to go away.'_

_Blankly, Aoi stares at him, and for a frightening moment looking into those eyes feels like an echo of the upstairs: one hundred volts, straight to the brain._

_Like being burned alive all along your nerves; like getting the cracking static shorting sound trapped inside your veins. When he lifts his cigarette to his lips, his arm feels almost too heavy to make the journey._

_'What happened?' he asks at last, softly. 'Did I –_ hurt _you, or—'_

_Miserably, his lips pressed tight together, Uruha shakes his head._

_'But...' Aoi makes a helpless sort of gesture towards him and immediately Uruha flinches back, glares at him._

_'Don't touch me,' he snaps, his voice sharp and quite unlike his own, and Aoi quickly pulls his hands back._

_'I'm sorry,' he said hastily, 'I'm sorry. I won't. I promise.'_

_Uruha starts biting at his finger, pulling at the skin._

_'People never keep their promises,' he says, the words coming out a little muffled, and Aoi smiles ruefully._

_'No, they don't,' he says gently, and Uruha seems to hesitate._

_Carefully, he reaches out and touches Aoi's hands. He rests each of his fingertips against the tops of Aoi's knuckles, concentrating intently; when he's satisfied, he glances uncertainly at his face. One of his fingers is bleeding, Aoi notices, the blood smudging along his fingernail, which is neat but cut brutally short._

Because he bites them _, he realises._

_Uruha's quiet for a long time, his lips moving just barely as he counts, and when he does finally speak his voice is still tense but it's lower, a little softer._

_'You made me feel better,' he says._

_Gently, methodically, he turns Aoi's hands over so they're palm up._

_'I didn't have to count,' he muttered. 'I didn't have to –_ think _.'_

_He says the last word almost angrily, and Aoi stares at him._

_'You liked it?' he says uncertainly, and Uruha immediately snatches his hands away; starts pulling at his own sleeves. When he looks through his hair at Aoi, though, his eyes aren't angry; they're soft, confused. He makes an unwieldy movement, something that might have been a grab for Aoi's hand again, and Aoi hesitates._

_'I want to kiss you,' he says stupidly, surprising even himself._

_'Fuck you,' Uruha retorts angrily._

_But he steps forward, an unsettled moth in the darkness, and clumsily he presses their lips_

 

together. Slowly, Aoi opens his eyes.

Fuck the asylum, he thinks vividly, and fuck the doctors; fuck their ECT machine and their pills and their hushed, closed off ward where time stops and no sounds carry. Fuck all of it, because they aren't getting that memory – not that one, or any of them since: Uruha sneaking into his room, getting underneath the covers; Die dancing, sliding their bodies close together; a hazy view of the lot of them crammed together on the sofa, singing violently up at some no-face, no-name orderly, bodies so mashed together they could have been one creature.

They can't have those memories. Fuck that.

Blond, red and black hair all tangled together on a pillow; laughing softly, feeling four arms around his middle.

No, they can't have those.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So guys, this is the first of a few planned oneshot additions to the Maps storyline, taking on the perspectives of different characters to better tell their stories. Hope you liked it, or at least found it not too weird.


End file.
